So... is mail not getting in/out from Nanog right now, or is the fairly major fiber cut in San Jose not newsworthy on the operational list anymore....?
I'm gonna guess that people were too distracted with "Oh crap, where'd the internet go?"
I couldn't get to outside email from inside for a while.
So since there's the question, for those not in the know, the word is that there was a cut through half of a 1000 strand cable owned by Level3, affecting 502 fibers.
It's my understanding that they've been splicing since 23:45 GMT and that they're moving through the mass of fibers at an impressive rate.
I have it on good authority (fiber provider, around 5:30 pm pst) that the outage happened in two phases. First, an electrical contractor backhoed a large fiber link in downtown San Jose (address deleted due to security concerns) this morning, causing moderate damage. Initial repair efforts apparently went nowhere; there wasn't enough cable and trench space to work with. Around 2pm PST the repair lead onsite had the remaining cable sliced at manhole access points a couple of hundred meters each direction from the original cut, to give them clean surfaces and workspace for the splice. Which of course took out the other hundreds of pairs which had survived the initial backhoe. We certainly didn't get any warning that was going to happen, and neither did anyone else we were able to talk to over the course of the afternoon. I also understand from a couple of fiber providers that an unusually large amount of other fiber had been groomed onto that one cable over the last few years of consolidations. Eight or nine people I had talked to thought they had geographically distinct ring loops that turned out to be on that one cable when the second cut took it down hard. -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com